Keynes, Schumpeter, and the Economics of Childlessness

Perhaps for comic relief amid a news cycle otherwise full of escalation in Syria, the festering abuses of Guantanamo, and the wake of the Boston bombings, over the weekend pundits swarmed over Niall Ferguson for gay-baiting the long dead John Maynard Keynes. Tom Kostigen, who broke the story, summarized thus: “Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of ‘poetry’ rather than procreated.” Ferguson has since apologized, and as several sources pointed out, Keynes and his wife, Lydia Lopokova, did indeed try to have children, and she may have suffered a miscarriage. But Ferguson got a dose of the attention he craves, and pundits pleased themselves with their own moral fury, so everybody’s happy.

Unfortunately, the good name of Joseph Schumpeter has been dragged through the mud by this episode as well. Both Ferguson’s critics and defenders have said, in effect, “Schumpeter did it first.” Schumpeter’s 1946 American Economic Reviewobituary for Keynes is cited as proof: therein, Schumpeter writes of his subject, “He was childless and his philosophy of life was essentially a short-run philosophy.”

But Schumpeter is not indulging in any sly gay-baiting here—the issue for him isn’t homosexuality, it’s childlessness for whatever reason. The wider context of Schumpeter’s remark is that the “sober wisdom and conservativism” of Keynes’s economic advice was intended for a specific time and place—England after World War I—and was characteristic of the kind of person Keynes was: not homosexual but rather part of “the high intelligentsia of England, unattached to class or party … who rightly claimed, for good and ill, spiritual kinship with the Locke-Mill connection.” Schumpeter continues on this theme:

Least of all was he the man to preach regenerative creeds. He was the English intellectual, a little déraciné and beholding a most uncomfortable [postwar] situation. He was childless and his philosophy of life was essentially a short-run philosophy. So he turned resolutely to the only ‘parameter of action’ that seemed left to him, both as an Englishman and as the kind of Englishman he was—monetary management. Perhaps he thought it might heal. He knew for certain that it would sooth[e]—and that return to a gold system at pre-war parity was more than his England could stand.

If only people could be made to understand this, they would also understand that practical Keynesianism is a seedling which cannot be transplanted into foreign soil: it dies there and become poisonous before it dies. But in addition they would understand that, left in English soil, this seedling is a healthy thing and promises both fruit and shade.

So much for the context. But isn’t the reference to childlessness at least indirectly an attack on Keynes’s sexuality? Probably not. Consider what Schumpeter writes about children and economics, in a clearly heterosexual context, in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy:

As soon as men and women … acquire the habit of weighing the individual advantages and disadvantages of any prospective course of action—or, as we might also put it, as soon as they introduce into their private life a sort of inarticulate system of cost accounting—they cannot fail to become aware of the heavy personal sacrifices that family ties and especially parenthood entail under modern conditions and of the fact that at the same time, excepting the cases of farmers and peasants, children cease to be economic assets.

… In order to realize what all this means for the efficiency of the capitalist engine of production we need only recall that the family and the family home used to be the mainspring of the typically bourgeois kind of profit motive. Economists have not always given due weight to this fact. When we look more closely at their idea of the self-interest of entrepreneurs and capitalists we cannot fail to discover that the results it was supposed to produce are really not at all what one would expect from the rational self-interest of the detached individual or the childless couple who no longer look at that world through the windows of a family home. Consciously or unconsciously they analyzed the behavior of the man whose views and motives are shaped by such a home and who means to work and to save primarily for wife and children. As soon as these fade out from the moral vision of the businessman, we have a different kind of homo economicus before us who cares for different things and acts in different ways. For him and from the standpoint of his individualistic utilitarianism, the behavior of that old type would in fact be completely irrational.

“Individualistic utilitarianism” is characteristic of modern people in general, but it was characteristic first of the English intellectual class to which Keynes belonged. It may have been bad form for Schumpeter to reference the specific fact of Keynes’s childlessness in his retrospective appreciation, but what Schumpeter has in mind is not a criticism of homosexuality in particular so much as modern sexual attitudes—sexual-economic attitudes, more accurately—in general. This was a topic about which Keynes himself famously had much to say.

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17 Responses to Keynes, Schumpeter, and the Economics of Childlessness

And of course what Schumpeter might have had to say about either childlessness or being homosexual, in 1946, has nothing whatever to say about what Ferguson blathers on about in 2013.

The bigger point is the context of Keynes’s quip. The point was that the gold standarders argued that despite the short-term pains of unemployment, depression, and so on, by keeping the gold standard, in the long run the economy would balance itself out. And not only that, classical economics failed to actually give a sense of what that long run meant: ten years, twenty, a hundred? It was an abstract long run, much as the invisible hand of the market is an abstract concept.

Whether or not economically speaking that theory is or was sound was besides the point; Keynes had to deal with real people starving, real revolutionaries potentially fomentic trouble, capitalism failing in real time. The issue was not whether “in the long run”, the economy corrected itself; “in the long run” – that is, in the abstract long run of classical economics, “we’ll all be dead.” He could have had twelve children and a brood of grandchildren, and it would not have made a difference in the specific comment he made.

And let us not forget that Keynes was just an academic, like Ferguson; the many hundreds of officials, politicians and leaders who took up and implemented his theories were presumably not “effete” members of society; they presumably had children and families whom they did not, unlike Ferguson, abandon and cross the Atlantic. The silliness of Ferguson’s comment is simply beyond repair, regardless of what Schumpeter might have said or meant.

Would be interested in reading about this topic without reference to Schumpeter or Keynes personally. For example, are there studies trying to estimate the various macroeconomic effects that childlessness tends to have, whether good, bad, or neutral?

Arguing about what effects are “good, bad, or neutral,” of course, brings about disputes over value judgments.

For those of us who want our families and our people more broadly to survive, having children is a necessity. I would also argue that if one wants our country to have the best chance it can of being a more-or-less civilized place, let alone a place which shares the common language English and a common Anglo/Western cultural-moral heritage, all people who want that outcome had better have children, and several children per couple at that. (We have two babies and are hoping for more.) Some people biologically can’t have kids, and that is a personal tragedy for which one cannot be blamed (and one can then adopt, one of the most noble and giving acts possible).

An alarming trend which has been ongoing for some decades now at least, is the tendency of more productive people — often but not always people with more formal education, and arguably more intelligence — and English-speaking native-born Americans generally, to have fewer children than less productive people (often people with less formal education and, arguably, on average lower intelligence). That’s ON AVERAGE, so I am not saying that formally-educated are all more intelligent than people who lack formal education.

We personally know FIVE native-born Americans (four of European ancestry and one of asian/european ancestry) who have earned doctoral degrees who have chosen not to have children despite being able to do so (yes, we know them very well, so we know that they are able to have kids biologically). One is my sister, another is a close friend, and two are childhood friends. That’s two medical doctors (one man, one woman), a high-powered big-firm lawyer (woman), and a journalist (man).

Now, bring on the hate mail: we absolutely judge these people negatively for their selfish choice not to have children.

They are intentionally allowing their families (their genes and their family names and traditions) to die out.

Beyond their own families, these childless-by-choice people are ensuring the quicker downfall of our country and our culture. By failing to have children while Mexican immigrants have many, these short-sighted people ensure that the USA will continue its transformation into a non-English-speaking, non-Western, uncivilized, dangerous, dirty, ugly, unfriendly place.

They are ensuring that our children do not have enough able-bodied civilized adults who speak their language, share their basic societal values, and are able and willing to stand alongside them to fight for our culture, land, and freedom.

When our children and grandchildren are hopelessly outnumbered at the ballot box, they can thank these people who chose not to make the efforts and sacrifices needed to have their own chidren.

When our children and grandchildren are hopelessly outnumbered in the halls of political and economic power, and discriminated against in education and employment, they can thank those alive now who choose to think only of themselves and let the future go to hell.

Finally, and most dire, when our children and grandchildren are hopelessly outnumbered in the violent street conflicts that unfortunately seem very likely in our future, they can thank those same people. Those physical conflicts, sadly, look like they will be largely along racial and ethnic lines, particularly Mexican against non-Mexican. A sad prospect, and hopefully avoidable, but not optimistic.

This isn’t rocket science, folks: those who have children will inherit this country and this planet. Those who choose, in too large a proportion, not to have children, will not. They will see their families, their people, and their culture eventually cease to exist. It’s happening already.

I hope these childless fools are enjoying whatever they are doing with the time, funds, and effort they are spending on themselves instead of the next generation of Americans.

Yes, it is “their choice,” and of course it should be. But it’s our right to condemn them as selfish disloyal fools for making that choice.

Did anyone outside Keynes’s own circle know about Keynes’s homosexuality before the 1970s? I rather doubt it. Nixon, after the 1971 end of the quasi-gold standard, said “I am now a Keynesian,” but this hardly implied approval (or even awareness) of Keynes’s erotic life.

If this latest Sturm und Drang in a tenure-tracked Tea Party should cause just one of The Children™ to pick up Ten Great Economists by Joseph Schumpeter, an economist who, while playing chess in three dimensions in a profession largely content with checkers, called ideas and their makers to dramatic life with the pen of a novelist. And his posthumous History of Economic Analysis will never be surpassed.

It is perhaps fair to point out that George Washington was childless, and this had a specific effect on his career–he could be the first President without the fear of establishing a hereditary dynasty. He was Father of His Country specifically because he was not literally a father.

Since all good conservatives are also good Christians, it’s helpful to recall that Jesus was childless, as was St. Paul. Moreover, Paul explicitly warned Christians against marriage (not to mention procreation), on the grounds that concern for one’s spouse would distract one from “the Lord’s affairs”. The fact is, the Christian ethic–at least as found in the gospels and in the early writings of the likes of Paul–was decidedly “short-run.” Thankfully, some adjustments have been made over the intervening centuries, allowing Christians to pile up treasure on earth with a clear conscience and to properly take thought for the future: man, after all, does not live by the Sermon on the Mount alone.

“I would also argue that if one wants our country to have the best chance it can of being a more-or-less civilized place, let alone a place which shares the common language English and a common Anglo/Western cultural-moral heritage, all people who want that outcome had better have children, and several children per couple at that.” [et seq.]

Ordinarily, when for reasons better imagined than described I subject myself to such essays in tribalist rat poison as the comment thumbnailed above, it has been my inveterate custom in these designer threads to thank their bylined authors for saving me time over future threads I’d otherwise never get back, and wish them well in the playing of The World’s Tiniest Violin to, in the bitterly asymptotic end, packed houses of sub-atomic particles.

But as one who, seeing what is apodictically entailed in the way of the enaction of the commenter’s desiderata unto the seeding unto perpetuity of white, Anglophone Western Xian (those of the Eastern rite are, we can only assume, still on presumed double-secret probation) “civilization” against the ninja-seriatim procession of its foes, not least in the guilt-mongered resuscitation unto paternity (sorry if in my cash-strapped NYU days thirty years ago I, true story, flunked the freezer portion of my sperm-donor’s finals, study … hard over many a candle-burning all-nighter though I had) of an at least fingers-of-one-hand contingent among my otherwise unpaired li’l guys in their … shoulder-launched (you’d have had to be there) quadrillions these last two-score years, far from dispatching the commenter’s noble sentiments with my accustomed snark-miming inverted idealism, I am as I type this with my free hand slicing Onion after Onion in hopes of someday catching up in flooding the rivers of crocodile tears meet to the present occasion.

In concluding, commenters, no flood of hate mail of the sort so desperately and lasciviously summoned above by our twin-initialled sibling in Christ – thank you, Young Jeezy, that will be all – will in holding the full bladder of its declared truths prove necessary in self-evidence – the mere fact of the inevitability of its – the becomingly-ungendered commenter’s current two babies and no doubt counting down to an Armageddon that, Gott im Himmel under present evidence, cannot come soon enough, already in bouncing, bawling progress, reaching and thence surpassing their respective ages of majority under a fatal alienation from even an already Ivory-dispositive 56/100 of 1% of the desiderata of helicopter parents of the sort who do their stage opposites on the left far less than prude and far more than proud – is sting in prospect enough.

You can hide behind your sanctimonious posturing all you like, but the numbers do not lie: JB is right. This absurd experiment being conducted by the liberals and corporations that have hijacked America’s immigration law will be looked upon by future civilizations with amazement and bewilderment, as they try to understand why the most advanced nation of its time by its own policies and lack of foresight, committed suicide.

Since acquiring what little I possess in the way of world literature via successive installments of the “Quotable Quotes” feature in old Eisenhower-era numbers of the Reader’s Digest, usually right after my morning coffee while passing great chunks of the transcripts from the previous night’s Mark Levin show, I’ve long been under the impression, admittedly vague, that this “James Joyce” of whom you speak was more or less the Scott Lahti of Dublin – much as “Michael N Moore” – or so I, straining my eyes as well even more, have while red in the face read.

And you are welcome indeed to have been invited to that most select in self-selection of elites among those moved, after a fashion if one unlike that by which I, above, may be said to have fertilized a movement at once Of One and Of One’s Own, to attend my latest concert in these designer threads: it is an honor indeed, and one almost for me as well, for which you are more than welcome to thank yourself.

“- or are you just off your meds?”

Actually, very much on them – the worst thing in the world you in your essays in commentarian hermeneutics could do would be to discount the role, over the evening at issue, of the great floods of Steel Reserve underwriting and overwetting my whistling wind – and since my three actual meds at apothecashandcarried issue are in their daily series of strictly sub-thoracic destination, I can assure all those still awake that the 96 ounces of 8.1% strength lager I did in fact absorb on Monday night were psychoactive prescription enough, thanks to all for the implied compliments of superhumanity in thought, in word and indeed otherwise.

“You can hide behind your sanctimonious posturing all you like”

Great point about the whole “hiding behind” bit common in these threads – that’s why whenever moved to loose into human populations the even more marginally rancid among my responses to the intimidatingly Parnassian intellects herein, I always like to do it under the joke-store nose-and-glasses of assorted Greek-prefix Other-sweating screen names as, e.g., “Xeno”. It shows good form – and it’s What Jesus and Socrates Alike Would Do.™ A message from the Well Endowment, and Readers Like You.

You’d think The Google would show more respect for that Austrian economist, however marginal as a utility player back among the dimly-glimpsed economists of time, best known for his work on decidedly non-Keynesian forms of “pump-priming”, and his catchphrase “the perennial jet reactive to suction”.